Israel again razes Palestinian shacks in West Bank

Friday

Oct 31, 2008 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2008 at 12:02 PM

MUGHAYIR EL DIR, West Bank -- The Israeli army knocked down shacks in a West Bank village for the second straight day yesterday, leaving dozens of Palestinian Bedouin homeless, a United Nations official said.

MUGHAYIR EL DIR, West Bank -- The Israeli army knocked down shacks in a West Bank village for the second straight day yesterday, leaving dozens of Palestinian Bedouin homeless, a United Nations official said.

Israeli military spokesman Zidki Maman said the structures razed were built in a closed military zone without permits and that the villagers had been warned.

Forty-five people lost their homes Wednesday in a village near the

West Bank city of Hebron, said

James Weatherill, Humanitarian Affairs Officer at the U.N.'s Office

for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Yesterday's operation in the village of Mughayir el Dir, 8 miles northeast of Jerusalem, destroyed 25 homes and left dozens of people homeless.

The villages affected are in the nearly two-thirds of the West Bank under full Israeli control, pending a peace deal with the Palestinians.

A May U.N. report said that since 2000, Israel had issued demolition orders against about 5,000 Palestinian-owned structures in the Israeli-controlled zone, knocked down more than 1,600 of them and rejected 94 percent of Palestinian building requests.

About 350 Bedouin live in Mughayir el Dir, a village of scattered tin-and-wood shacks on a rocky hillside. In September, the army told eight families living in the lower part of the village to leave their homes, Weatherill said.

The villagers appealed the orders, and a court decision was expected to come Saturday, Weatherill said.

But a bulldozer, escorted by two army jeeps, knocked down about three dozen shacks and animal sheds yesterday.

"Because they filed this appeal, they thought they were good for now," Weatherill said. "So the fact that (the military) showed up today to do the demolition is surprising and troubling."

After the bulldozer left, Sami Khamis Zaydat looked over the tangled tin and wood of the four buildings that had been home for him and 13 family members.

He said villagers had lived on the spot for 50 years, and he had no idea where they would go as winter sets in.

"Israel doesn't want us to have a place to sleep," said Zaydat, 26. "It could rain later, and we'll end up sleeping here on the dirt."